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The Trump administration has the goal, expressed in the order, of detaining families together indefinitely, until their immigration cases are complete.

The southern border has been a site of mass confusion since June 20, when President Trump released his executive order ostensibly ending the practice of family separation for undocumented immigrants. Senior Customs and Border Protection officials said they would stop referring parents crossing illegally for criminal prosecution. The Justice Department denied that shift, but also dropped charges on 17 migrant parents in McAllen, Texas before a sentencing hearing.

Whether prosecuting or not, the Trump administration still has the goal, expressed in the order, of detaining families together indefinitely, until their immigration cases are complete. That goal is contingent on convincing a federal judge to rip up the Flores settlement, a 1997 agreement that says migrant children can only be kept up to 20 days in non-secure, licensed facilities. On June 21, Trump’s Department of Justice asked a judge to change the rules, but the Obama administration asked for the same changes in 2016 and was rebuked.

All of which may explain why the stock prices of oligopoly private prison companies Geo Group and CoreCivic have been rising ever since the Trump announcement, a pure expression of the sacks of cash awaiting private companies if they contribute to caging immigrant families. These companies already run two massive family detention centers in south Texas that would be primed for indefinite detention. They also run immigration jails for individual border crossers without children. And they can construct more—in fact, that has become their business model.

Geo Group and CoreCivic are actually real estate companies, as a new report from the anti-privatization group In The Public Interest explains. In 2013, both companies converted into Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs), which exempts them from corporate-level taxation as long as they meet a certain threshold of real estate assets. This tax shelter saved Geo Group $43.6 million in 2017 alone.

Instead of being contracted to manage facilities, Geo Group and CoreCivic want to build and own the facilities themselves. Top executives of both for-profit companies have stressed this desire in investor calls. This not only saves on taxes, it’s far more lucrative than operations management. Estimates from CoreCivic’s financial disclosures show they earn 71 percent more revenue per prisoner in owned and managed facilities than in ones they solely manage—and six times more profit per prisoner.

Trump’s new executive order signals the administration’s desire for far more immigrant detention construction. This is already in play; Geo Group is completing work on a 1,000-bed facility in Conroe, Texas, under a 2017 contract with ICE. Just today, ICE issued a request for information on “potential facilities to accommodate up to 15,000 beds,” something the private prison firms are well-positioned to deliver.

When a private company owns a detention facility, they have the incentive to lobby the government to keep it open. And as private financing deals charge higher interest rates, that sunk cost may keep the government interested in using the asset long term. It all amounts to entrenching a punitive model of immigration enforcement at the highest levels, for private gain.

The day-to-day operations can go to the private prison firms or a network of private contractors handling shelters in border regions, like Southwest Key, which has made at least $955 million on immigrant shelter contracts since 2015. These sites, incidentally, are awful, with a history of abuse of migrants and billions of dollars in settlement payments. By spending less money on personnel and maintenance these firms are able to increase their profits. That anyone would see these de facto jails as appropriate places for families awaiting outcomes of immigration cases is shameful.

Almost as lucrative as the sheltering contracts are the contracts to transport and deport migrants, either by air or by land. If minors ever get reunited with their families, some company will have to transport them as well. The need for this service ramped up significantly with the Trump administration’s ‘zero tolerance’ policy at the border.

Somebody has to finance all this activity, and that predictably falls to the big banks. A 2016 In The Public Interest report identified Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, BNP Paribas, U.S. Bancorp, Wells Fargo and SunTrust Bank as the primary lenders to private prison companies Geo Group and CoreCivic, providing $900 million in lines of credit for real estate financing and other business operations. Because of the corporate structure of these companies, they depend heavily on bank lending to survive.

SunTrust Bank, a large regional based in Florida, also has a significant lending deal with MVM, secured by all of the company’s assets. SunTrust has a similar deal with Comprehensive Health Services, Inc., one of the private contractors operating shelters for unaccompanied minors.

There’s a better and far cheaper way to handle the Trump-created crisis at the border. Instead of blowing money on private companies to warehouse people, a case management pilot program, since discontinued, provided direct supervision and access to legal counsel after families were released. It was 99 percent effective in getting families to court and through the asylum process, at about one-tenth of the cost. The Trump administration discontinued case management last year, but it would be a far better and more humane solution.

There’s only one catch—the company that ran the case management program was a subsidiary of the Geo Group.

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Working, marching, writing, and educating as many people as I can. Working in industrial hemp, permaculture, and neighborhood gardens. Teaching people to start subversive plots (in the form of backyard gardens), is a revolutionary act. :-)Having a peace/industrial hemp educational picnic this month. I have been speaking out for peace since the Vietnam era, for whatever good it's done. The American Sheeple are convinced that invading nations is necessary to protect our freedumb.

An American hemp industry would do a LOT to provide clean, sustainable jobs for millions, but the US would rather spend $50,000 a year to house a person in hell, rather than educate or train them for industries that could save the planet. The Farm Bill is passing through Congress though, and is being taken off schedule one as I write. Hemp could provide everything that cotton, petroleum, and trees provide, but with far less toxic processes. Capitalist greed took it out of the hands of American farmers, but it's coming back in a big way. It's just one solution of many, but it's a really good one.

Posted by dopfa on 2018-07-02 19:57:40

All of that is bad, yes. What are you doing about it?

Posted by Jennifer R. on 2018-07-02 19:02:54

Utter bullshit. You're saying they don't have papers - where is the proof of that - but that's actually not a law; the only way they would be "endangering" their children is if you think the US is inherently an unsafe country, in which case whose fault is that?

Posted by Jennifer R. on 2018-07-02 19:02:26

That is the conservative christian capitalist way to make money....abortion is not allowed genocide is.

Posted by Emilio Rivera on 2018-06-27 00:06:52

And the US is not even in the top 10 of of countries with regard to immigration, legal or otherwise. More people are fleeing the US than coming into it.

Posted by Arguman on 2018-06-23 21:28:06

The parents are actually committing no crimes. They are misdemeanors at worst.

Posted by Arguman on 2018-06-23 21:26:59

So Trump is under the influence of the Private Jail Cartel as is the governments in central America. By the way, these parents are committing a minimum of two crimes as they enter the US with underage children: coming to the US without proper paper [as all countries on the planet require] and they are 'endangering a child' by their actions. The U.S. has procedures for allowing people to legally immigrate to this country. Few if any country has allowed as much immigration as the U.S. Now next time you are in a long line, cut to the front & say you are supporting illegal immigration. Post back the response of the people you cut in front of.

Posted by JimFogleman on 2018-06-23 16:15:40

The Geo Group and the Corrections Corporation of America have been making billions off taxpayer dollars on their private prisons for way longer than Trump has been in office. Obama built the things for detaining families, and Trump is using them and building more. This is a BIPARTISAN ISSUE! The Democrats don't give a rat's ass about immigrants. Obama deported over three million people and detained countless families in converted prisons. Where was the moral outrage?!

And now that everyone is up in arms about mistreated children, how about we look at what the US has done to children in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Pakistan, and all of the Central and South American nations these desperate people are coming from to warrant their escape from the hell we've caused by supporting asshole leaders in their nation.

Congress cuts food stamps, kid's lunches, and healthcare for kids in America so they can put that money toward blowing kids apart in other nations, and for building prisons for kids who come America to escape the crap we cause in their nations.